When J. R. R. Tolkien's trilogy, The Lord of the
Rings, appeared some seven
years ago it accomplished on a modest scale the sort of
critical controversy which The Waste Land and Ulysses
had occasioned a generation
earlier. Like them, it could not be easily
reviewed; it was anomalous; it forced examination of critical

It is nearly impossible to summarize the trilogy for
those who have not read it. It is not the complications of a plot
that cause the difficulty, but the complications of a world. The
trilogy world, set in the Third Age, so far back in time that it
precedes the earliest heroic age, is far richer in levels of being
than our own is. Though there are "humans" in this
world, they are by no means the central figures. The heroes are
hobbits,[3] creatures some three feet high with furry feet, who
live in burrows in a land called The Shire. Other beings of
varying degrees of rationality are the elves, the dwarfs, the ores
(yahoo-like brutes), various monsters, spirits, ghosts, talking
trees, even a kind of archetypal "vegetation god" (Tom
Bombadil). There are nearly as many languages in this world as
there are kinds of beings; and though there is a common language,
most of the beings prefer to speak their own tongue. Tolkien has
taken some care with these languages, paying most attention to the
elvish speech, and part of the charm for those who like the
trilogy lies in the songs written in elvish, and in the place
names and the proper names of the characters, many of which are
philological jeux d'esprit. Thus Sauron, the Enemy, lives
in the smoky land of Mordor, "where the shadows lie."
The heroic human who fights alongside the hobbits is named Aragorn.
The incredibly old talking trees are called Ents. The courageous
dwarf is Gimli, whose ancestors mined gold in the mines of Moria,
under the Misty Mountains.

The story itself is of incredible adventure and of war on
the largest scale possible in this
world. By accident Frodo, the hobbit
hero, gains possession of a magic ring of power lost years

Now The Lord of the Rings is certainly not a
realistic novel, not a symbolic novel,
perhaps not a novel at all as we usually
understand the term. It would seem closest to "myth,"
except that we generally think of myth
as some sort of adumbration of what was
once either fact, or felt to be fact, or desired to be fact. But

Another critic, Patricia Spacks, refutes Wilson by pointing
out the ethical character of the
trilogy. It is not a matter of Good People
versus Goblins; "the force and complexity of its moral and

Against all these opinions we must set Tolkien's own remarks
on the work, made in a statement to his
publisher. Wilson quotes these with
great relish, regarding them as the last evidence he
needs to show the inanity of those reviewers who found serious
value in the work. Tolkien himself has
confessed, Wilson thinks, that the work
is only "a philological game." Tolkien has said,
"The invention of language is the
foundation. The 'stories' were made
rather to provide a world for the language than the reverse.
I should have preferred to write in
'Elvish'." When people ask him "what
it is all about," he replies that it is an essay in
"linguistic esthetic." "It is
not 'about' anything but itself. Certainly
it has no allegorical intentions, general, particular or
topical, moral, religious or
political."[10] This last disclaimer
is for Wilson the end of the matter: that will settle the
Manichees!

For my purpose it does not matter much whether Tolkien was
being ironic when interviewed, or
whether writers' remarks on their own work
are to be taken as final evidence as to the nature and
meaning of their work. The aim of the critic,
as Chesterton once remarked, is to show
what the artist did, whether the artist meant
to do it or not. But in the interest of truth it should be pointed
out that Wilson makes the matter far
too simple, and the internal evidence
of the work shows this quite clearly. The trilogy may
have begun as a philological game easily
enough, but other things have grown
beneath their makers' hands. And if it were relevant I
could cite innumerable passages in the
trilogy which are clearly not part of
any game, philological or otherwise passages in which
the heart of the author is laid bare for all
to see who read them. No one ever
exposed the nerves and fibers of his being in order to
make up a language; it is not only insane but
unnecessary.

However we take Tolkien's remarks, I believe that the genre
and meaning of the trilogy are to be
found in his essay on fairy stories,
published seven years before the first volume of the
trilogy, though he has said that the trilogy was some seventeen
years in the making. The essay has not been
completely ignored in discussions of
the trilogy. Straight, for example, points out
briefly that the trilogy accords generally with the specifications
that Tolkien laid down for the fairy
story. And Lewis' review of the second
and third volumes spends some time defending the work
on a basis which is really part of Tolkien's
fairy story thesis, though Lewis does
not mention this. But the total relevance of the
essay to the trilogy, and the nature of the theory set forth in
the essay, have not, I think, been
sufficiently examined.

Tolkien's essay attempts to determine the nature, origin,
and use of fairy stories. As to the
nature of them, no definition can be arrived
at on historical grounds; the definition instead must deal
with "the nature of Faerie: the Perilous
Realm itself, and the air that blows in
that country."[11] But this is exactly what cannot
be either defined or accurately described,
only perceived. Faerie may be roughly
translated as Magic, but not the vulgar magic of
the magician; it is rather magic "of a particular mood and
power," and it does not have its
end in itself but in its operations. Among
these operations are "the satisfaction of certain primordial
human desires" such as the desire
"to survey the depths of space and
time" and the desire "to hold communion with other living
things." Travelers' tales are not fairy
stories, and neither are those stories
which utilize dream machinery to explain away their
marvels. If a writer attaches his tale of marvels to reality by
explaining that it was all a dream, as in the
medieval tradition, "he cheats
deliberately the primal desire at the heart of Faerie:
the realization, independent of the
conceiving mind, of imagined wonder."

Now these remarks throw much light on the trilogy. It is a
fairy story in the sense just
described: it concerns itself with the air
that blows through the Perilous Realm of Faerie. It attempts to
satisfy "certain primordial human
desires." It surveys the depths of
time, as Lewis' interplanetary trilogy surveys the depths of
space, and in Tolkien's sense, Lewis' trilogy
is thus a fairy story. The story itself
is of the Third Age, but the story is full
of echoes out of the dim past; in fact, the trilogy is in great
part an attempt to suggest the depths of
time, "which antiquates antiquity,
and hath an art to make dust of all things." The Third
Age is, for the reader, old beyond measure,
but the beings of this age tell stories
out of ages yet deeper "in the dark backward and
abysm of time," and in fact often
suggest that these stories recount only
the events of relatively recent times-Browne's
"setting part of time"-and that the oldest things are
lost beyond memory. All this is to
satisfy that primordial desire to explore
time, for "antiquity has an appeal in itself." Fairy
stories, Tolkien's among them,
"open a door on Other Time, and if we pass
through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time,
outside Time itself, maybe."

And the trilogy attempts to satisfy the other desire,
"to hold communion with other
living things"-again, as Lewis' trilogy does.
The Ents, for example, the great trees of the Third Age, are among
the oldest living things. They speak to
the hobbits in a language as old, as
slowly and carefully articulated, as the earth itself.
And when Tom Bombadil speaks, it is as if
Nature itself- nonrational, interested only in life and in growing things-were
speaking. The elves, the dwarfs, even Gollum
and the ores, are gradations either up
or down-from the human level; they are "other
living things" with whom the reader holds communion in the
trilogy world of imagined wonder.

Readers of Lewis will recall that he has had much to say of
the stories of Beatrix Potter: it was
in these that he found the early glimpses
of the thing he called Joy. And Tolkien finds something
in them of Faerie. They are mostly beast
fables, he thinks, but they "lie
near the borders of Faerie" because of the moral element
in them, "their inherent morality, not
any allegorical significatio."
And here is a partial answer to the question
which, as we have seen, all the critics of the trilogy have dealt
with: the relevance of the work to human
life. It is not only through allegory
that invented characters and actions may have
significance. Allegory is ultimately reducible to rational terms;
and in this sense there is no allegory in The Lord of the Rings. But
there runs throughout the work an "inherent morality" which
many critics have discerned, and which some
have tried to reduce to allegory. It is
the element of the numinous that is to be found
throughout the work of George Macdonald and in Lewis' novels. It
is the sense of a cosmic moral law,
consciously obeyed or disobeyed by the
characters, but existing nowhere as a formulated
and codified body of doctrine. Patricia Spacks has commented that
Tolkien has included in the trilogy "all
the necessary materials for
religion." It is even more accurate to say that he has
included conscience, which may be defined,
for the purposes of the trilogy, as an
awareness of natural law. But it is not a rational
awareness; that is, rationality plays almost no part in it. It is
an emotional or imaginative awareness; the
doctrine does not exist, but the
feeling normally attached to the doctrine does. The
value of this inherent morality, as we will see, comes under
Tolkien's heading of "Recovery,"
which is one of the uses of the fairy
story.

Fairy stories, then, are those which utilize Faerie, the
"realization of imagined wonder,"
and which have, or may have, an inherent
morality. Their nature is "independent of the conceiving
mind," or, as Lewis said of Macdonald's
myth-making, it comes to us on a level
deeper and more basic than that of the conceptual
intellect, and must be perceived with the imagination.[12]

Tolkien's views of the origin of fairy stories take us a
step closer to the heart of the matter.
The history of fairy stories is "as
complex as the history of human language." In this history
three elements have figured in the creation
of "the intricate web of
Story": invention, diffusion, and inheritance. The latter two
lead ultimately back to the first and do
nothing to clear up the mystery of
invention. For diffusion is merely "borrowing in space"
from an inventor, and inheritance is merely
"borrowing in time." Both
presuppose an inventive mind, and it is the nature of the
inventive mind that concerns Tolkien.

The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our
world coeval. The human mind, endowed
with the powers of generalization and
abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it
from other things . . . but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very
faculty that produced it, was the invention
of the adjective: no spell or
incantation in Faerie is more potent. And that is not
surprising: such incantations might indeed be
said to be only another view of
adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical
grammar. The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow,
still, swift, also conceived of magic
that would make heavy things light and
able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and
the still rock into swift water. If it could do the one, it could
do the other; it inevitably did both. When we
can take green from grass, blue from
heaven, and red from blood, we have already an
enchanter's power-upon one plane; and the desire to wield that
power in the world external to our minds
awakes. It does not follow that we shall
use that power well on any plane. We may put
a deadly green upon a man's face and produce a horror; we may make
the rare and terrible blue moon to
shine; or we may make woods to spring
with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and
put hot fire into the belly of the cold worm.
But in such "fantasy," as it
is called, new form is made; Faerie begins; Man
becomes a sub-creator.

Clearly, behind this description of the inventive mind is
the romantic doctrine of the creative
imagination. Faerie is a product of the
"esemplastic" imagination, a product of Coleridge's
Secondary Imagination, which is an echo of
the Primary Imagination that creates
and perceives the world of reality.

Nor is the creative imagination to be taken lightly or
metaphorically in Tolkien's theory of the
fairy story. The writer of the story is
really a subcreator; he creates a "Secondary
World" which the mind of the reader really enters. Further,
the reader's state of mind is not
accurately described in the phrase "willing
suspension of disbelief," which indicates a kind of
tolerance or tacit agreement. When the story
is successful, the reader practices
"Secondary Belief," which is an active and
positive thing. So long as the writer's art does not fail him,
"what he relates is 'true': it accords
with the laws of that world. You
therefore believe it, while you are . . . inside."

Tolkien elaborates, and slightly qualifies, the doctrine of
the creative imagination in his
discussion of the use of fairy stories.
He begins with a dictionary distinction between the Fancy
and the Imagination. According to this
distinction, the Fancy is the
image-making faculty, what Coleridge called "a mode of memory
emancipated from the order of time and
space," while the Imagination is
"the power of giving to ideal creations the inner
consistency of reality." Coleridge
thought of the two capacities as wholly
distinct faculties, the Fancy being analogous to the
Understanding, and the Imagination analogous to Reason. Tolkien
would combine them because he believes
"the verbal distinction philologically
inappropriate, and the analysis inaccurate The
mental power of image-making is one thing, or aspect; and it
should appropriately be called Imagination.
The perception of the image, the grasp
of its implications, and the control, which are
necessary to a successful expression, may vary in vividness and
strength; but this is a difference of degree
in Imagination, not a difference in
kind." What gives "the inner consistency of reality"
or Secondary Belief is not properly
Imagination but Art, which is "the
operative link between Imagination and the final result, Sub- creation."
Needing a term to express both the "Sub-creative Art"
and "a quality of strangeness and wonder
in the expression, derived from the
Image," he chooses to use the word "Fantasy." For
the term in the sense in which he means it
"combines with its older and
higher use as an equivalent of Imagination the derived
notions of 'unreality' (that is, of
unlikeness to the Primary World), of
freedom from the domination of observed 'fact,' in
short of the fantastic."

He is aware of the implications of the word
"fantastic," that it implies
that the things with which it deals are not to be found in
the "Primary World." In fact he
welcomes such implications, for that is
exactly what he means by the term, that the images which
it describes are not extant in the
"real"? world. That they are not
"is a virtue not a vice." We recall Shelley's lines: "Forms
more real than living man,/ Nurslings of
immortality." Just because Fantasy
deals with things which do not exist in the
Primary World, Tolkien holds, it is "not a lower but a higher
form of Art, indeed the most nearly
pure form, and so (when achieved) the
most potent." It is relatively easy to achieve "the inner
consistency of reality" in realistic
material. But good Fantasy is very
difficult to write. Anyone, Tolkien points out, can say "the
green sun," but

To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be
credible, commanding Secondary Belief,
will probably require labour and
thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a
kind of elvish craft. Few attempt such
difficult tasks. But when they are
attempted and in any degree accomplished then we have a
rare achievement of Art: indeed narrative
art, story making in its primary and
most potent mode.

The fairy story, then, of which the trilogy is an example,
uses Fantasy, and so far as it is
successful is "story-making in its
primary and most potent mode." That is to say, in dealing
with fantastic things rather than with
real ones it attempts the purest form
of narrative art, and succeeds to the extent that it induces
in the reader the state of mind called
Secondary Belief. In short, invented
stories, if successful, are better and on a higher level
than stories which merely manipulate the
materials of the Primary World. Here we
are reminded of Coleridge's distinction between the
Reason and the Understanding, the latter manipulating the
"counters" of the real world. Now
Fantasy is a higher form than Realism
not only because such invented stories are harder to make
but because they offer to the reader certain
things which realistic stories do not
offer, or do not offer to the same degree.
These things Tolkien calls Recovery, Escape, and
Consolation.

"Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health)
is a regaining-re-gaining of a clear
view." Recovery is a means of "seeing
things as we are (or were) meant to see them...." All
things become blurred by familiarity; we come
to possess them, to use them, to see
them only in relation to ourselves. In so doing
we lose sight of what the things themselves really are, qua
things-and "things" here includes
people, objects, ideas, moral codes,
literally everything. Recovery is a recovery of
perspective, the old Chestertonian lesson which Tolkien calls
"Mooreefoc, or Chestertonian
fantasy," the lesson of Manalive.
Fantasy provides the recovery necessary to those of us who do not
have humility; the humble do not need fantasy
because they already see things as not
necessarily related to themselves; their vision
is not blighted by selfishness or egotism. Lewis, I have said,
defends the trilogy's relevance to life, and
he does so in terms of what Tolkien
means by Recovery. He has said that the book has
some of the qualities of myth:

The value of myth is that it takes all the things we know
and restores to them the rich
significance which has been hidden by 'the
veil of familiarity'. . . . By putting bread, gold, horse,
apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do
not retreat from reality: we
re-discover it. As long as the story lingers in our
mind, the real things are more themselves. This book applies the
treatment not only to bread or apple but to
good and evil, to our endless perils,
our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth
we see them more clearly.[13]

Applying the theory of Recovery to the trilogy, then, we
rediscover the meaning of heroism and
friendship as we see the two hobbits
clawing their way up Mount Doom; we see again the endless
evil of greed and egotism in Gollum, stunted
and ingrown out of moral shape by years
of lust for the ring; we recognize again the
essential anguish of seeing beautiful and frail things-innocence,
early love, children-passing away as we read
of the Lady Galadriel and the elves
making the inevitable journey to the West and
extinction, and see them as Frodo does, "a living vision of
that which has already been left far
behind by the flowing streams of Time."
We see morality as morality by prescinding from this or
that human act and watching the
"inherent morality" to which all
the beings of the Third Age the evil as well as the good-bear
witness. And, perhaps, the devouring nature
of time itself is borne in on us, as it
was on the Elizabethan sonneteers, and we
learn again from the trilogy that all things are Time's fools,
that all comes within the compass of his
bending sickle.

If Tolkien is right, if Recovery is what he claims it is,
and if Fantasy provides Recovery, then
it follows that Fantasy, far from being
irrelevant to reality, is in fact extremely relevant to
moral reality. And the trilogy, so far as
Tolkien's art does not fail him, is an
example of the dictum, so favored by the
Renaissance critics, that literature is both dulce and utile, that Spenser can be a
better teacher than Aquinas.

Finally, Tolkien holds that the fairy story, by the use of
Fantasy, provides Escape and Consolation, two
elements which are very closely
related. In fact, Escape brings about Consolation as
its end or effect. Now the fact that the fairy story is
"escapist" is the very crux
of the accusations brought against it, as we have
seen in regard to the trilogy. But Tolkien will not admit that
escape is a bad thing. The word, he thinks,
has fallen into disrepute because its
users too often confuse "the Escape of the
Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter."

Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison,
he tries to get out and go home? Or if,
when he cannot do so, he thinks and
talks about other topics than jailers and prison walls?
The world outside has not become less real
because the prisoner cannot see it.

Thus escape from Hitler's Reich was not desertion; it was
really rebellion, a refusal to be
identified with Hitler. And, Tolkien thinks,
this is often the nature of escape. A man may refuse to
write about the world in which he lives not
out of cowardice the usual accusation
-but because to write about it is in a sense to
accept it. He may, like Thoreau, simply secede. And this is not
desertion; it is war; it is "real
Escape, and what are often its companions,
Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt."

But fairy stories, Tolkien thinks, provide other Escapes,
and these bring about Consolations of
various kinds. Fairy stories, like
other kinds of literature and like many other things as well,
can provide a kind of solace in a world of
"hunger, thirst, poverty, pain,
sorrow, injustice, death." And this kind of solace
or respite is necessary; it is not refusal to
face reality, it is a time needed to
regroup one's forces for the next day's battle.
Thus the poets talk of care-charmer sleep and the sleep that knits
up the ravelled sleeve of care; but
they do not advocate sleeping one's
life away. Further, fairy stories, as we have seen, provide
a kind of consolation in their satisfaction
of "primordial human desires."

But the major consolation that the fairy story has to offer
is one which it contains to a degree
that no other kind of literature can equal.
It is "the Consolation of the Happy Ending":

Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy
stories must have it. At least I would
say that Tragedy is the true form of
Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy- story. Since we
do not appear to possess a word that expresses
this opposite-I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic
tale is the true form of the fairy-tale, and
its highest function.

What the fairy story pre-eminently presents is "the joy
of the happy ending," and it is in
this respect that the fairy story, for Tolkien,
is related to reality. But the reality is not the reality
of this world, the world of flux and opinion:
rather the eucatastrophe "denies .
. . universal defeat and in so far is evangelium,
giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the
walls of the world, poignant as grief." The good fairy story,
by means of its eucatastrophe, gives
the reader "a catch of the breath,
a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed
accompanied by) tears," for in the eucatastrophe the reader
gets "a piercing glimpse of joy,
and heart's desire, that for a moment passes
outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and
lets a gleam come through...." The
relevance of the fairy story to reality
lies in this gleam, which is a "sudden glimpse of the
underlying reality of truth."

Thus there are two answers to the question, Is the fairy
story true? The first and obvious
answer is, It is true if it induces Secondary
Belief, if the art has successfully translated the image
of the "created wonder." But that
is merely a question of art. The nature
of the eucatastrophe suggests that the second answer is
infinitely more important, for "in the
'eucatastrophe' we see in a brief
vision that the answer may be greater-it may be a far-off
gleam or echo of evangelium in the
real world." It is in this second
truth that the fairy story, for Tolkien, ceases to be
merely literature and becomes explicitly a
vehicle for religious truth.

God has redeemed man in all man's capacities, and one of his
capacities is that of telling stories,
especially fairy stories. As Redemption
has once more made man in the image and likeness of
God, so the capacities of man to some degree echo the capacities
of God. In this sense, this second truth of
the fairy story is "only one facet
of a truth incalculably rich," for in all spheres
of human activity there is necessarily
something like the signature of God.
The eucatastrophic fairy story, a product of
redeemed man, echoes the Gospels, which contain a story
"which embraces the essence of all
fairy-stories." For the Gospels contain
not only marvels, as the fairy story does; they contain
the birth of Christ, which is "the
greatest and most complete conceivable
eucatastrophe," "the eucatastrophe of Man's history."
And they contain the Resurrection, which is
"the eucatastrophe of the
Incarnation."

The joy which the happy ending of the fairy story gives,
says Tolkien, is of the same quality,
though not the same degree, as the joy
which we feel at the fact that the great fairy story of
the Gospels is true in the Primary World, for
the joy of the fairy tale "has the
very taste of primary truth." This is the
justification of the fairy story-and thus of the trilogy-that it
gives us in small, in the beat of the heart
and the catch of the breath, the joy of
the infinite good news. For "Art has been
verified. God is the Lord, of Angels, and of men-and of elves.
Legend and history have met and fused."

It is not too much to say that Tolkien's view of the fairy
story has made explicit Coleridge's
claim for the worth of the creative imagination.
The Secondary Imagination, which created literature,
was for Coleridge an "echo" of the Primary Imagination,
which is "the living Power and
prime Agent of all human Perception, and . .
. a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation
in the infinite I AM."[14] For the fairy
story-and the trilogy-are sheer
creation, the making of a Secondary World out of, and by
means of, the Imagination. That is the
special activity of the fairy story
maker, and one by which he becomes, not a writer, but
a subcreator of a kind of literature
analogous-or more than analogous-to the
universe created ex nihilo by the divine
Creator. In his degree he creates Joy-or creates what gives Joy-as
God, in the purposeful drama of
creation, has created what also gives
Joy, the world with the Christian happy ending. Speaking of
Blake's definition of poetry, Northrop Frye
has commented:

We live in a world of threefold external compulsion: of
compulsion on action, or law; of
compulsion on thinking, or fact, of compulsion
on feeling, which is the characteristic of all pleasure
whether it is produced by the Paradiso or by an ice cream soda.
But in the world of imagination a fourth power, which contains
morality, beauty, and truth but is never
subordinated to them, rises free of all
their compulsions. The work of imagination
presents us with a vision, not of the personal greatness of the
poet, but of something impersonal and far
greater: the vision of a decisive act
of spiritual freedom, the vision of the recreation of
man.[15]

Tolkien's defense of Fantasy and, I would add, of the
trilogy, in verse in which there is
perhaps more truth than poetry, is also a
defense and, it may be, the last defense, of the doctrine of the
creative imagination, which brings the making of God and the making
of man so close that they nearly touch:

Although now long estranged, Man is not wholly lost nor
wholly changed. Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned, and
keeps the rags of lordship once he owned: Man, Sub-creator, the refracted
Light through whom is splintered from a single White to many hues,
and endlessly combined in living shapes
that move from mind to mind. Though all the crannies of the world we
filled with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build Gods and
their houses out of dark and light, and sowed the seed of dragons-'twas
our right (used or misused). That right has not decayed: we make
still by the law in which we're made.

2 Some of the materials for such a history have of course
already been examined: Hoxie Fairchild's Romantic Faith (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1949), C. T. Sanders' Coleridge and
the Broad Church Movement (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press,
1942), and Basil Willey's Nineteenth Century Studies (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1949), for example.

3 The hobbits were introduced in Tolkien's children's book The Hobbit (Boston: Houghton, Miffin, 1938).